gehringer_2

interesting take.

or the teams negotiate NIL deals that only pay if the athlete stays or require claw backs if he leaves. I would think this must already be happening.

there is another way to look at it though. The rich franchises pay these crazy salaries that never return their value in wins, and that soaks up the revenue differential and in a backward kind of way that's an equalizing force. It's just a weird setup. In the main, your billionaires don't buy teams to make money from them, so the guys lucky enough to own the NY and LA teams are going to end up with a ton more income, and it has to go somewhere if the owner doesn't care about taking it out of the team in profit. Now in a perfect world, those LA and NY owners might realize that spreading the income around more would lead to a better league, but they are too competitive for sharing money with other owners to appeal to them. So you have a lot of money with basically no-where to go but silly salary levels for lucky athletes. Dumb set-up, but here we are.

Israel takes the opportunity of a military organization vacuum in Syria to destroy every military asset it can find on the ground in Syria - navy ships, chem weapons, military aircraft, missile, etc. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-strikes-syria.html

right - as the PG, but then I translate the rest as "long players to go with him and that's not Ivey." But to me then it follows not Beasley either.

🎉🎊🎇

Are you saying Beasley is 'longer' than Ivey? or do you just mean a long term solution that doesn't include either?

I don't think the Devil is worried about having to sharpen his skates on that one.... 🥶

I'd put it this way if I were the Tigers: as of this moment he's slated for Toledo, but he has a wide open opportunity to change that in ST.

definitely more to this than ever.

Still, the fact that the league located a team in a black hole doesn't negate the fact that the Ray's Front Office plays the hand they have been dealt as well as anyone. But the Franco situation is such a killer for the Rays if he is toast - hard to imagine a bigger blow a team could suffer organization wise than losing a young, controlled all-star caliber SS for nothing.

Freedom(dumb?), baby!

Trump word salad. We should all be used to it by now. But hey, if he can be leveraged into supporting some kind of better direct election system, I'll go for it!

I wouldn't make decisions based on the chance Jobe wins ROY. He has awesome potential, but hasn't yet shown the kind of in game consistent dominance that a Verlander or Skenes did before their call-ups and if you don't hit the ground already running full speed you won't win ROY.

The key to success in the future will be to ID guys early and tie them up before they know how good they are. i.e. Colt Keith type signings. Of course you need to be right. OTOH, you can make a couple of $20M/yr mistakes and still be ahead of making one $50M mistake.

Nice find to post. Fingerprinting based on the split paths - good tried and true detective concept. But still - a lot of work and ultimately getting physical IDs still appears to depend on being able to subpoena someone at the cash out end to get the real world ID. That may or not be possible in any given case. Of course if you have a crooked off-shore bank to work with, you may not need bitcoin anyway. 🤔 But also consider the reality of how police agencies actually work. Most crimes go unsolved not because they are unsolvable, but because the resources are not available to solve all crimes using available methods. Luigi Mangione would probably still be walking around if his target had been lower profile than Brian Thompson. If you commit a big enough Bitcoin crime, maybe TPTB make the kind of effort Meiklejohn did to find you. If you're smaller scale with your illicit activities, will you be worth the candle? I suppose it depends on how simple/automated Meiklejohn's methods can be/have been made.

Jobe did not look ready at the end of last season, if he picks up where he left off, he's still got some work to do.

IDK, Lalonde doesn't seem to have the key to him, or maybe he isn't right physically - I've thought more than once this season that his skating looked labored. And if his conditioning is bad, that's even worse.

Yeah - I don't think the wings were actually playing that much faster, they just had more time because the Sabres gave them more room than they usually get from other teams. The defensive breakdowns remain nuts. I don't remember which Sabre goal, Sabre player standing in front of the net, two Wing players were down low, but neither bothered to play the man in front of the net, he was just chilling unmolested and blocking the goalie's view for maybe 10 seconds with 10 feet of space to either side before the goal went in. WTF?

I'm putting it at 50/50 Maeda gets into the rotation at all. At 36 and relatively slight (for a pitcher), he'll probably try to train harder, rip something, and be done. Manning will probaby get some run if he's not traded, and Gipson-Long sometime before the end of the season unless he has a rehab set-back.

Gustafson seemed to have a little more jump tonight. I would like to see this team with any two players other than Motte and Petry.

We are probably due for some regression in the starting pitching - but at least there is plenty of depth. But with so many young hitters there is room for the offense to pickup the slack if the kids start putting more balls in the seats as they get stronger. Dark horse candidate for a comeback - Alex Lange.

He wasn't terrible in 78 PA agasint LHP in '23, 657 OPS but a 333 OBP. Last season he did pretty much nothing in only 32 AB. Considering how bad our RH hitters were I'm not sure why Hinch didn't give him a little more run to see what he could do. It's definitely an issue, if you only always play to the short term platoon advantage with a given hitter, then it does pretty much become a self-fulfilling situation that he's not going to get any better at handling same side pitchers, and sooner or later he's going to have to face one when it matters or at the least you will have to make a substitution you don't want to.

Everything Maeda throws is a change-up

Larkin - walk in the park for the winner.